Williams College
Museum of Art/Williamstown, MA www.wcma.org
DAVID ROKEBY:
TAKEN
The fertile territory at the
intersection of art and surveillance is hot real estate these days. David
Rokeby stakes his claim with Taken, an installation at Williams College.
Three screens occupy the
gallery's walls. The first, a ten-foot-by-ten-foot grid, alternates projections
of previous visitors' faces with close-up surveillance shots of current
visitors', each labeled with an adjective such as "resigned,"
"reassured," "unthreatened." Rokeby's miraculous custom
software picks out a visitor's face and follows it around the room-a white
square appears on the screen tracking its progress - and though one's rational
mind knows these adjectives are assigned at ran David Rokeby, Taken,
installation. Courtesy dom, a moment of panic ensues: If contemporary
surveillance technology can recognize your face, can it also tell how you feel?
On a second screen, visitors'
images scroll continuously upward through a flux of shifting gray shapes.
Movement is detected by a camera and mapped into this stream. When standing
still, one's image disappears -a discovery that is at once liberating and
terrifying. Is a Unabomber-like retreat into isolation and nonexistence the
only alternative to having every movement monitored?
The third screen gives a hint of
an escape route. Here one can see one's own image overlaid, like a photographic
exposure, with those of everyone else who has walked through the gallery. Alone
in the space, the visitor shares the virtual space on the screen with the
specters of previous visitors who mill about in a dense, semitransparent jumble
of bodies. Your first instinct is to wave your arms or jump around in order to
pick your own image out of the crowd-but that's what all the previous visitors
did, too.
A roomful of ghosts waving their
arms, silently clamoring for recognition before the automated eye of the
surveillance apparatus: a metaphor of the artist's role in a paranoid and
security-obsessed society.
Copied from UMaine Folger Library Database on 03.07.17
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